Ivy - why will it not die?

For the second year running I am now involved in guerilla warfare against Ivy and by Ivy. I mean this.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...egated-ivy.jpg

Over the course of a year, it has completely regrown and covered all the land I ripped it from last time and it is in the process of choking out several trees in the garden.

It is evil, evil stuff.

Nothing appears to stop it growing and I have bags of dead ivy to throw away. I want it dead, cutting it to pieces only seems to affect a small part of it. Uprooting it from the lawn only seems to encourage it.

I want an Ivy Killer, I want something with fire and brimstone and I want it gone before I find its tendrils growing again.

Nuke it from orbit? Ivy laughs in the face of being nuked from orbit. I swear that after the holocaust all the cockroaches will be fine because they will all be eating Ivy. :Shake:

A few years back I read the increased carbon dioxide in the air is very good for poison ivy. I would suspect it might be true for regular ivy too. On the bright side at least you are only dealing with ivy.

Too the best of my knowledge the only good way to remove ivy is to have your yard excavated of all the roots. This is probably not worth the effort and it is cheaper to just go through a routine of chopping it out twice a year. There is a product called Vine X that is suppose to kill the plant but I have heard that while it worked better than most spray weed killers it does not get all the ivy without multiple applications. We were looking into for our poison ivy and I saw many complaints about even when it killed the poison ivy the fact it needed to brushed on led to severe rashes. Again not a problem in your case with normal ivy.


I did some checking, the increased CO₂ is good for poison ivy but I cannot find and cites for it helping ivy.

Ivy will not die because it is evil, and that is the way of evil things.

Give up and use spray killer that goes into the roots. Ivy will regrow from even a tiny section of root you do not pull out and, worse yet, you will not be able to see it regrowing its roots until you wake up and there's an eight inch trawl of it again. Sometimes it even grows forward from ivy across your yard that has connected roots all the way to that end, so when you rip it out (and one of the smaller ends tears from the other), it continues growing in that direction again.

Hence the essence of weeds.

If you get a lot of precipitation it's even worse. Ivy loves just about as much water as it can get so while the rest of your plants may be waterlogged the ivy will take the opportunity to scramble higher. We got so much rain here that in less than three weeks Ivy had climbed up a cedar tree on all sides and began choking it out, even forming a canopy at the top of the tree.

Should you not want to risk the poison, I can only suggest using a gardening fork and gently uprooting the ivy as far as you can, then packing new dirt back in tightly (maybe where nothing is growing?) and mulching or putting plastic down. It's not easy, but it's not technically impossible if you make it expend plenty of energy growing back and then uproot it again to stop the ivy if it's not coming from another ivy plant elsewhere.

At least that's what I've heard. I've just given up and poison the damn things. And it will take more than one or two or three applications.

Panther is right. Anything that grows with root runners is almost impossible to get rid of. Our yard was infested with Ailanthus trees, which is the tree referred to in the book title "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." They will grow anywhere, even in cracks in the sidewalk. We had maybe 100 little trees, and we dug them all up, and then a few days later we had 100 new little trees. We basically dug up every inch of dirt in our backyard, and removed every bit of root we could find. A 1" segment would have a tree pop up out of it in a few days. Once we did that, we kept watch for new little trees and when we saw one, would go digging for the root section we had missed the first time. It sucked royally.